


Blessings

by faufaren



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Gen, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, POV Original Character, Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-07-28 17:53:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7650718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faufaren/pseuds/faufaren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He goes out into the world and he meets so many new people-- people that are kind to him, gentle like no one has ever been gentle with him before, people that are good in their hearts and pure in their intentions, and they want to help him. But he's already gone-- taken apart and completely shredded beyond any hope of repair, and you can't fix something that's not even there anymore. </p><p>Follows Hunter X Hunter 2011 storyline. Rated T for language, gore, dark themes. OC-centric. No pairings; implied.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Circles

There was something underneath his skin.

Of course there were the usual things like meat, blood, and bone, but something else was scuttling around somewhere in there and he didn't like it. He picked his arm out of boredom, where a small scab sat, where the tranquilizer had been shot into him.

Put in the isolation chamber again. This time, it was for failing to stop when they'd told him to (well he couldn't just have _left_ it lying there, not when it was nearly halfway to death already).

It was always 'isolation this, isolation that' with them, just like that Queen of Hearts whose favorite thing to do was behead anyone who displeased her. (And they couldn't get rid of him either, not when he was still so useful, so fascinating to take apart and put back together, their most successful project out of all of them, theirs, but it was oh so easy to make him think that they had really forgot about him in there. So... very… _simple_.)

The Queen of Hearts, in this instance, were the people who ran this institute-- they were the people who opened other people up and fiddled around with some things inside, then stitched it back up and hoped that the person healed properly. They were the people who injected strange substances into other people with needles with a prayer that it cured them on the off chance. The people who talked with other people of tragic circumstances and gave them pills to swallow so they could perhaps function properly again.

They were the people that others called doctors and nurses, but here, at the Angelius Pardon Institute for the Mentally Ill, they were not so much healers as they were mad scientists and prison wardens.

He was on the ground with his knees drawn up into his chest, trying to conserve heat warmth even though it kept being leached away by the dry air around him and the cold surface of the floor every time he found any.

_It's cold. And dark._

He was tired of the dark. So bored of it. He wanted light (the real kind and not the cheap fluorescent type that chilled him to the bone and made everything too white and too shiny), but he couldn't remember what it was like. Couldn't recall whether the sun tasted sweet or salty or sour.

He was pretty sure it involved seeing, though. Here in the darkness, he couldn't see a thing. Nothing but the things his head made up for him.

The walls were thick, he knew. Everything was muted. No sound breached through and nothing leaked outside. There wasn't a glimmer of light to be seen. It was dark--

And so _cold_. He couldn't ever forget about that, it was important to him. The one sensation that covered him like some slimy blanket, and sunk deep into his bones and gripped his insides with barbed, spindly fingers.

He'd swear he could see his breath hanging in the air but it wouldn't really be true, not when he couldn't see anything, because it was dark, and also cold. Circles and circles. His mind liked to do that-- go in circles on a single tangent in order to keep boredom away. Redundancy was always abundant when a person was stuck in a small empty room with nothing to do.

Sometimes they left him inside for a few hours and sometimes it lasted for days and days until he lost track of it all. He'd go numb all over and start unravelling at the seams like some sick gruesome flower that bloomed only when the dark had become an endless solid void and it started to leak into his brain through his ears.

Then the door would open, and it would always feel like waking up to find that he had actually always been awake. He'd be dragged out of there and plunged into the blinding bluish light of the laboratories that somehow always managed to feel even more cold than inside, left blinking out the leftover darkness from his eyes while he was pulled, yanked, and twisted around every which way by hands in blue gloves and large white coats.

And he let them. They always spent the most time with him, paid the most attention to him. He was special. They told him he was special, in the beginning, when he was a tiny little six year old who'd just arrived, and thus required the services of the institute. Then after a while they decided he was exactly what they needed and wanted and they took him downstairs where everything didn't quite change but it was close enough.

But the _real_ issue here, the thing he couldn't get over yet, or ever-- was his parents.

Because being sent to the looney bin by his own parents when he'd just barely finished learning how to read wasn't very nice of them at all-- and for such a stupid reason as well. If… _once_ he got out of this place, perhaps he'd pay them a much needed visit. They hadn't visited _him_ once when he was still in the upper levels (and once you went deeper down you wouldn't be seen ever again for a very long time).

It would be messy, of course. _All over the place._ A simple throat slitting was much too clean to be satisfactory. He liked messes. It was like art. To forego any opportunity to make a fantastic mess and not have to clean up after himself was a complete waste and he couldn't allow any of that.

Death by burning was a rather slow, grueling, agonizing fate-- if he could get it _just_ right-- and drowning was another kind of terror. He'd always been fond of the elements... but they were always so overused. Unoriginal, cliched methods used too many times by too many people. Completely and utterly _boring._

Premature burial leaned more towards the passive suffering side, but it could still be so _terrifying_. Just imagine that, _imagine_ suffocating, trying to breathe through all the dirt in your nose and mouth, clawing and flailing your way through the darkness with a desperate kind of fervor but you don't know which way you're going, and for all your efforts you might just be digging yourself deeper-- and yet you knew that the surface might just be right there, all but separated by a few scant inches of dirt… _(Well, he would know. But he got out in the end, and he wouldn't make that mistake with them.)_ Even so, it wouldn't be fun if he couldn't actually see anything.

There had to be blood and guts-- so much he could (drown) swim in it all-- all bone shards and brain matter and it had to be _everywhere_. He could almost taste the metal on his tongue, smell the stench of fear and agony, hear the sweet lullabies of their screams. How would it be, when he finally reached them?

He wanted to cleave their heads open, so perhaps he might be able to find out why _(why? WHY?)_ directly from their wrinkled grey brains. He wanted to strangle them with their own intestines, rip their tongues out of their skulls, take away from them the ability to make up any of those annoying empty excuses he knew people always liked to make. He wanted them to know exactly how much he hated them, how much he'd dreamed of repaying them someday, how through everything that had been done to him this was the one thing he'd held on to and it was the only thing that had kept him from totally losing himself, he wanted revenge he wanted to get out he wanted to kill die it isn't fair notfairnotfair _helpme—_

He sucked in air. Then sighed. And he noticed. The absence, the emptiness, the utter absurdity in the room. _There was no cold._

In fact, it was warm. Becoming hot, even.

He slowly uncurled himself from his position and stood up, hearing his joints pop and crack as he stretched his muscles, sore from staying still for so long (when was the last time he'd moved around? He didn't remember). He started towards the door, padding across the formerly cold floor, now burning the bare bottoms of his feet. The skin was blistering already. Idly, he wondered what was going on outside. Were they, perhaps, making an attempt to cook him?

If so, he had to be disappointed in them. They should know better ways to cook a live human.

Suddenly the door imploded inwards. He managed to duck and dodge the broken shards, just in time to avoid a particularly large piece taking his head clean off. A jagged edge of one metal shrapnel caught him on his cheek, splitting open the skin like jelly. In the second after he straightened again, he was blasted in the face with a rush of humid, stuffy _warmth._

He recoiled. A step back alerted him that already his body was subconsciously trying to retreat back to the familiar room that wasn't cold and dark (wasn't _familiar_ ) anymore (protect the senses, his subconscious said, protect the mind). His eyes were squeezed shut, but he could see how bright it was outside through the translucent red of his eyelids. Slowly he fought to crack open them again, only to flinch at the blinding bitter brilliance that surrounded him now.

It wasn't even hot anymore. It was _burning_. He was literally being baked on the spot ( _AH_ , said his mind, _this was much more like it_ ). What was going on? He had to open his eyes, risk of blindness be damned. He couldn't die like this, not now, he still had things to do! The door was wide open anyway. In fact, it wasn't even there anymore-- and there were no doctors or nurses (or scientists) shoving him back inside. Where were they?

Holding a hand up to his face, he attempted to pry open his eyes again. Once he had adjusted, his attention was immediately distracted from the burning of his retinas to the burning of the building. That was to say, it was _on fire._

He stumbled out into the burning hallway, trying to remember which way the stairs were. At this rate, the entire building would collapse on top of him and it'd be too tedious to dig himself back out for it to be worth the effort. As he continued on through the thickening smoke, he looked into the rooms he passed by, curious. The main laboratory-- what was left of it, anyway-- was in smithereens. The lights were blown out, already being smothered by thick smoke, glass containers lay shattered all over the area, miscellaneous liquids spilled. The cabinets were melting and all the drawers and trays of tools were on the floor. He still didn't see anyone, alive or otherwise.

By the time he finally found the stairs and stumbled up them like a maimed donkey the air was beyond polluted with thick black smoke, almost making him choke on his own lungs when he discovered it was even worse on the ground level.

There was a flaming chunk of... something that came down on his head just as he emerged from the stairs and he hopped over a charred body to avoid it (one of the janitors, he recognised the uniform). He paused, and took a moment to appreciate the carnage all around him. The entire building was lit aflame, some parts of the ceiling already collapsing as the other occupants of the institute ran around in panic, frantically trying to escape what had now become a fiery death trap. He counted more than a dozen corpses already trampled on the floor, in the process of being eaten up by the fire.

A shower of flaming rubble dropped onto him from above and he just barely managed to avoid setting his own hair on fire. Something told him that removing himself from the current environmental dangers was a good idea. Yes. Okay. His cheek was still bleeding, but he was too distracted to bother with staunching the flow of blood from the cut (minor head wounds always bleed the most anyway).

He began to pick his way out of the destroyed building, ignoring the screams and cries of agony from the people who were trapped under fallen debris or behind walls of flame and the motionless carcasses squishing under his bare feet. The skin on his hands were blistered from grabbing onto superheated metal supports and his shirt caught fire a few times but he made it outside still breathing at least. It was even brighter outside.

But then he looked up and saw _the sun._

It was almost too much for his overwhelmed, deprived brain. He realized that he'd completely forgotten how the sun's rays of light felt on his skin and against his eyes, the strange taste that formed on his tongue... dissolving, and coating his taste buds like slick oil. It was foreign. It felt weird. He felt the urge to scratch at the feeling on his skin and gurgle boiling water until he had peeled everything from himself.

It still felt like his flesh was going to melt right off his bones. He continued on until he was at a comfortable distance from the inferno because he preferred his face where it was right now.

Now deeming himself properly safe, he turned around and watched the rest of the building, nothing more than a blackened skeleton now, collapse inwards upon itself in a plume of burning cinders. _Oh wow._ The corners of his mouth curled into something like a half-smile and a short bark of laughter burst out of it in twisted delight. Wonderful. It was _marvelous._

And it would be all too cruel, if this was only a dream. To suddenly wake up in the darkness again, picking at numb half-healed scabs as his mind slowly dissolved under the weight of the cold. (But he _didn't_ , and he was going to enjoy this dream while it lasted.)

A sharp, hacking cough made him look down to his right. A man was dragging himself by his arms on the ground, slowly making progress towards the only other occupant on the grass. His hair was singed and a fresh ugly burn on his face had half melted one eyelid so that it drooped down in a grotesque, moronic way. The man's white coat and blue scrubs, ruined by black ash and burning fabric, identified him as one of the doctors who worked at the institute.

"H-help... please..." The doctor wheezed the words out, ending in a pitiful whine on the last word, unable to say any more. His glasses were cracked and melting off his due to the heat. He shakily reached a burnt hand out to him, pinkish-white flesh peeking out from under charred skin. It was a pathetic sight.

Unimpressed with what looked to be the equivalent of a pile of trash on the ground, he observed the doctor's progress under hooded lids, apathy in his eyes. He wondered why the doctor clung to life so desperately. Given the man's profession, he would've thought things like death and injury were no uncommon thing in their daily lives.

It was a peculiar scene-- a grown adult crawling on the ground, asking an eleven year-old for assistance. Children had always been the weaker powers of society after all, and grownups governed their entire lives until they, too, joined the ranks among the adults.

Before the doctor could squeeze out anything else to say, a large fist descended out of nowhere and smashed his skull to smithereens. Blood and brain bits flew, some splattering on the boy and his clothes. The loud crunch registered in his ears a second later.

He didn't even blink. He slowly dragged his eyes to the person who committed the act. It was a tanned man wearing what seemed to be animal furs (it was hard to tell whether they were real or synthetic, and he couldn't be sure enough to guess). The man's muscles bulged out of his body, rippling across his skin with every movement, while his fist dripped with recent blood. He was enormous, towering over the boy and showing off all his teeth with a devious grin on his face like the cat that ate the canary. Then he had to pause and consider that last statement, because he'd never seen a cat actually eat a canary.

" _Yo._ " It was a low, guttural grunt that emanated from deep in his chest. The man stepped over the doctor's body and crouched down to look at him properly, but even then his head was still higher than the boy's. He put his hands on his knees. His cheshire grin was still plastered on his face. "Kid, you from Angelius Pardon?"

The boy tilted his head to the side curiously, a hint of curious amusement on his face. Blood, from the headless doctor on the ground, slipped down his cheek with the movement.

"Not anymore." The words came out of him all whispery and hoarse from not using his voice for so long, and even he was taken aback at the sound of his own voice (so this is how it sounded like). He reached up and nonchalantly flicked away a sliver of brain on his cheek. The beastly man's smile widened.

"You don't get bothered by much, do you? Most people would be running away screaming by now." His black eyes gleamed with a sort of interest in the way that a person would look at their pet dog when it does a trick that they had not yet taught it. The boy regarded him likewise.

"Oi, Uvo!"

The call came somewhere behind him. A second later, he felt a presence appear uncomfortably close to him. He glanced behind himself to see another man, this time in contrasting appearance in comparison to the man called Uvo, being a considerable amount thinner. He had a thin layer of stubble on his face and wore purple robes similar to a ronin. His black hair was grown long, tied up in a tight style so it stuck out from the back of his head in a way that reminded him of a palm tree.

"Oh, Nobu, there you are."

The man named Nobu was scowling fiercely enough to vaporize a small island, glaring at the boy who stood before him. Alive. "What are you doing? Boss's orders said to make sure there weren't any witnesses."

Uvogin laughed in good humor. "Hey, kid. It's nothing personal, eh?"

Before he could even process what his words meant, his vision was struck with white. And then he was falling.

The boy's head was twisted and ripped off in a completely animalistic fashion. It flew high up into the sky, flipping and tumbling and flinging blood in arcs as it went, before it dropped on the ground with a wet, resounding smack. His yellow-green eyes, now glassy and still, stared into nothing. The rest of his body bonelessly sagged to the ground like a sack of stones.

Nobunaga chuckled at the violent sight. He glanced at his partner. "You went easy on him," he told him. "He probably didn't even have a chance to feel the pain."

"Huh. He was a weak little kid. I don't feel like wasting energy on weaklings. Let's go." Uvogin told the other man. Nobunaga grunted. It wasn't like they both didn't murder their fair share of innocent lives. They did that stuff for shits and giggles.

But just as they turned to leave, movement at the corner of Nobunaga's eye caught his attention, and he spared a glance back. And got stuck there at once. His eyes widened and he gaped openly at the strange sight as his mind tried to discern whether his eyes were lying to him or not. He decided he needed another witness to tell him if he was dreaming.

"Hey, Uvo--" He nudged the man beside him. "Look at that."

He jerked a chin back at the boy's body. They watched in silent astonishment as the blood that had been spreading from the beheaded body begin to flow backwards. The severed appendage seemed to be sucking everything that was spilling out back into the boy's veins.

The disembodied head at the side rolled on the ground like it had a life of its own until it had reached its rightful body with one last flop. Then it reattached itself with a audible 'schlck', the line of raw flesh disappearing underneath pale skin as an invisible needle and thread sewed the two parts back together again. The deep cut on his cheek knitted itself together as well, leaving nothing but traces of dried maroon on the now unblemished area to mark that there had been a wound there at all. His eyes slowly regained their former shine, blinked once, and then the boy pushed himself up on the concrete with his elbows and sat up.

_"Fascinating."_

The sudden intruding voice came from beside the two S-class criminals, who had watched the entire process happen in only a few quick seconds. They both turned to see their leader standing there with a poised hand on his chin, looking on with thoughtful grey eyes.

"Boss." Nobunaga nodded in respectful acknowledgement.

"The artifact isn't here." Chrollo Lucilfer informed them. The man made a note to remember the event, as his high sense of intuition seemed to be telling him that it was worth in noting the boy in regards towards the future. Perhaps he will meet him again. "Shall we go, Nobunaga, Uvogin?"

Uvogin grunted in agreement. The trio walked off, leaving the strange boy behind, who regarded them in silent curiosity as they disappeared off into the distance.

One of them had just ripped his head off. A giggle escaped him at the realization.

A gentle breeze ruffled his hair and rippled through the grass he was sitting on. He froze. Touched the little green blades and then looked back at the burnt corpse of a building and the black smoke column rising from the wreckage with increasing revelation.

He was... free. (No, whispered his mind, it can't be, soon you'll wake up and they'll get you and absolutely nothing will have changed. They'll find you. There is no escape, remember?) But. was he free? (YES, said his eyes that saw the destruction, his nose that smelled the smoke, his ears that heard the frightened birds in the trees, said his heart that had been cut up into too many pieces too many times; yes, he was truly, completely, totally, _utterly free!_ )

The giggles soon escalated into a full on fit of laughter as he fell back down on the ground and sunk his fingers into the dirt (soaked with his blood but he didn't care). He looked up at the sky-- so blue-- with pure delight on his face. He hadn't breathed fresh, natural air, felt the warmth of sunlight, touched something other than bitter cold tile under his feet in nearly six years.

But now. _Now,_ he can do what he'd wanted to do since his first year in that wretched institute.

_It was time to visit his parents._


	2. August 19th

There is a police officer stationed at the curbside, doing his rounds around the block, when he sees the strange little boy walking alone. The man in the blue uniform frowns, wondering harmlessly if he should be concerned. The child doesn't seem to be with any adult guardians, after all. Where are his parents? Surely there has to be a proper explanation. And what are those _stains?_

Perhaps he should ask the boy himself. The officer approaches, his intentions nothing but pure and true.

His eyes connects with the child's. He stops. An unfamiliar feeling blankets over his mind. _The eyes are the windows to the soul._ His blood chills. He feels cold. What was he doing again? He'd been patrolling before, he was sure of it. Why has he stopped in the first place? The boy walks past him.

* * *

He hopes his parents still live in the same location, though he isn't too worried. They aren't the type to spontaneously uproot themselves from familiarity so easily. (He knows those types, are all too familiar with the faults of the mundane populations of humanity-- every one of them as static and predictable as the rest.)

It matters very little to him how far away his parents are, not even if he has to walk his feet bloody in order to get to them. Everything else is insignificant, reduced to dust compared to what he'll have at the end of the journey. He's waited more than five years for it and nothing will stop him.

_Shhh... patience,_ he tells himself, catching the eyes of a policeman who'd thought that trying to distract him from his goal had been a good idea. _Patience is key._

(He's sick of waiting, always waiting and waiting for hours, days, for _eternity._ )

But apparently his parents hadn't thought much about the possibility that he would escape (they wouldn't have thought of his _goals_ if he did in the first place), or else they would have chosen an institute farther away. It takes only one night and the entire day after to arrive at the address.

The sun had just set when he finds his parents' home in a rather secluded area several miles away from the town he'd passed on the way there. It's surrounded by a forest and there is a gilded gate at the entrance, followed by an unnecessarily long driveway from the road to the actual house. The grounds are well-kept and the building itself is a classical victorian-style manor that looms up rather ominously before him.

His parents have kept their love for opulence, he sees.

There's a button on the side of the gate. He presses it. A robotic woman's voice comes from the tiny holes of the speaker. The toneless voice has a mellow effect that is neither pleasant nor malicious.

"Please state your name and purpose."

A name. It wants a name. What is the name that his parents gave him? He's forgotten. (They've always called him Subject 6, on paper he was L02-14, and he has never regarded names with much value. After all, if his own parents can't remember, why should he?)

"I'm a monster that's come to meet the people who've turned me into this."

There is a pause, then it says, "Error. Please repeat--"

He's moving before the silly robot voice can finish, spinning around and kicking the wrought iron gate crashing down.

He only takes a few steps further when a man blocks his path. The man is accompanied by two others. They are all armed.

"Stop!" says the first man, leveling his gun at his head. "Who are you and why are you here?"

The men are confused, he can tell, by this small child standing in front of them, who seems innocuous in all but the stains on his clothes and the look on his face. Their eyes flicker back and forth from his thin limbs and the destroyed gate on the ground behind him, the metal twisted and warped beyond repair.

After receiving no response, the man continues, "You're trespassing private property. W-we have the right to shoot and defend."

They watch the boy cock his head, like a curious predator eyeing its prey and deciding how it will hunt them down. There is something awfully, horribly wrong with this creature in front of them and they will never for a second believe that this is a human child.

The boy starts to walk towards them but it's all so very wrong wrong _wrong_ because that gait and how he holds himself is too much like the deadly stalk of a beast on a hunt. "Who are you people?" he asks, and the sound of a such young, _normal_ voice coming from something like him surprises them so much that they actually respond.

"We're the Hunters hired to guard this estate--" The man looks like he's stopping himself from fidgeting and loses the battle as he takes a step back. "Freeze! Don't move or I'll shoot!"

"Hunters? What's that?"

The boy takes another step and apparently it's too much for the first man because he utters a choked-off sound of fear and opens fire.

The deafening gunshot cracks through the air but the boy is gone, nowhere to be seen except that he appears half a second later, not even a foot away from the man. The other two jump away like the proximity burns them.

"Such a silly, dumb man." The boy stands on his toes and tweaks the man's nose playfully. He stares up into the terrified gaze, drinks it all in like it's a treat, ducking when the man cries out and swings the gun at his head.

"Don't wave that around so carelessly," he tells him, catching the man's wrist and twisting the gun out of his grip in one smooth movement. He smiles sweetly, but the smile looks out of place, like a clown's painted face. "You'll hurt yourself."

Suddenly there's another gunshot and the man is on the ground, a hole in his throat.

"Shit!" One of the remaining two men staggers back in shock, fumbling for the rifle on his back. In the next moment he joins the first man on the ground, gurgling weakly on his blood.

The other detaches a radio from his belt and starts shouting into it for reinforcements. He's dead a second later as well.

Obstructions taken care of, the boy considers the rifle on the corpse's body (still warm, still being bled out) and the gun in his hand, and decides to take both with him. He continues on his path and gets halfway down when suddenly more people-- different from the first three men, more plain-looking, all wearing the uniforms of regular security guards-- come out and surround him in a loose semicircle.

"Stop right there! Get on your knees and put your hands up! We will use force if you do not comply!"

Annoyance creeps in. His sticky smile flickers and dies. He looks at this crowd of twenty-something men hired to protect his parent's house and sees nothing but things in his way, things to destroy and smash to smithereens.

The word is nearly a hiss, an inhuman sound that's spat from his lips. "I don't have time for _trash_."

The sun sets. The air is cooler, the sky dimmer. The guards collectively take in a breath of shock when they see the boy's eyes glow in the shadows, a distinguished separation between the yellow and green rings that make up his irises, almost neon in the darkness and downright inhuman.

This is no child. There is no way. No child can kick down a two-hundred pound gate. No child can shoot down three men with such ease, without hesitation. No _human_ has eyes like that.

_Demon_ , their weak brains immediately conclude. _A demon in front of them._

One man's nerves snap and he gargles out a strangled cry, eyes wide with fear and sweat on his brow, bringing his shotgun up and aiming for the boy. The sound brings the rest of his colleagues into action, the braver of them pulling the weaker of heart into it with them. None of them want to be left out. To hold back means that their colleagues will get all the credit if they did win and they will be ridiculed for not helping. It means the higher chance of defeat. It means that they leave only a few people to face off the creature that has their minds screaming a shrill siren of _dangerdangerdangerdangerdanger_ at them.

To hold back means that they will be the last ones standing, and there's no chance of running away, not with this thing at their backs. Predators always like a chase. So, fuelled by prey fear and human cowardice, and with nothing else they can do about it, they open fire.

He jumps and dodges the first few bullets, brings up his own stolen gun. His teeth are bared at the challenge. "What are these irritating pests I see in front of me!" he snarls viciously, and shoots.

Guards start to drop like stones left and right, most of them going down clutching a bleeding hole in their arm or leg, their chest, not dead but dying, all of them in various states of pain. He isn't very good at being neat. He doesn't like to be. ( _A MESS A MESS A MESSMESSMESSMESS_ screams his mind, reveling in the rush, the thrill that spilling blood brings, lapping it all up like a starved dog.)

When the cartridge of bullets click empty (only nine inside the thing, that man hadn't been taking care of it very well), he pulls the rifle from his back, whirls around, and bludgeons someone's skull in with it. Their face caves in, deflates like a balloon. Brain pulp, pieces of skin, and blood explode into the air, some landing on his face, more on his clothes. The rifle is now dripping.

He spins around again, ducks a bullet, and swings the rifle down once more, flinging stripes of red everywhere. He leaps between the flying bullets, light and nimble, carving a path of blood and death through the guards. His hands are slick with gore. He has pieces of someone else's brain in his hair. He licks his lips and tastes metal on his tongue. He feels _alive_.

It takes only minutes to clean off the last of the useless security guards. At the end his clothes are ruined with blood that will surely cake, there are some already drying under his nails, and the rifle has been reduced to a twisted lump of metal.

No bullet wounds, not any that he can see on himself, only a few grazes and several scratches, and he thinks maybe that's alright. Small celebrations, don't they say it's the small things worth celebrating? _(What a load of bull, his mind tells him, they taught you better than this, they **made** you better.)_

He tosses the rifle away and it lands with a small splash on the ground. Turning, he continues on his merry way, bare feet padding through the large pools of red liquid, the piles of dead bodies behind him already forgotten.

He enters the house. No lights are on and the air is dead and silent. It appears that all the security guards had rushed outside when they'd seen the commotion, leaving the house virtually unprotected. Such silly people.

The walls are covered in red floral wallpaper, filled with swirls and squiggles, like it purposely wanted to make him dizzy. _Pesky wallpaper._ The interior of the mansion is as opulent as its exterior, lavishly furnished and well decorated, classical in theme and elegant in style. His parents still have good tastes, at least.

He knocks a flower vase off its pedestal. It crashes to the floor, the sound piercing through the solid silence of the house. Water and broken porcelain and flowers skid across the floor and his eyes follow one particular piece of porcelain, he sees a glint in the darkness. As he edges over to it, he recognizes it as a saber hanging on the wall, one of the many antiques sitting around this house. Curious, he reaches up and plucks it off the wall.

A sudden creak from behind alerts him, and he quickly jerks to the side as a bullet past him, so close he feels the heat on the bridge of his nose. There's man holding a rather fancy-looking antique revolver, and a cowering woman hiding behind him. He eyes the pair carefully, furrowing his brow, wondering why the two look so familiar.

Oh, he realizes with a jolt, my _parents._ Of course, these people are his parents. Right. Well, he'd been expecting their reunion to be special, but meeting your parents for the first time in nearly six years with your father shoving a gun down your throat definitely tops off the list. He thinks it's absolutely delightful.

The man pulls back the hammer on his gun, eliciting a loud, harsh click that echoes in the space between them. "Our entire goddamn security guard killed by a kid. Remind me to hire better ones next time," he mutters the spiteful words under his breath, then raises his voice. "The police is already on their way here. Get out of my house or else I'll blow a hole through your head!"

He glares at the boy in the eye, trying and failing to intimidate him. _Psychotic child,_ he thinks, and maybe his mind has been addled by living in too much luxury, because he misses the way the boy eyes him like he's a particularly amusing bug and he can't wait to pull all its legs out.

The boy's strange eyes widen ( _glowing_ , were they actually glowing? No, it can't be). A giggle bursts out of him. Then another, and another. The couple watches him as he throws back his head and slap a hand across his eyes, that odd terrible-sounding cackle that he seems to call laughter ringing through the building.

"What is wrong with you?" His father yells, startled, brandishing his weapon around in the air as if to ward off the obviously insane boy. "Stop that!"

Breathless and still giggling a little, the boy straightens. He's smeared the blood on his hands across his face, and the couple startles as he fixed his gaze upon them. Giving one last giggle, he mumbles, "I can't believe this."

_My parents don't recognize me._

Him, their son. The one his mother gave birth to and the one they named and lived with for a little more than six years before they sent him to Angelius Pardon. They don't recognize him. But he hadn't either, maybe he needs to help them out.

"Mother, Father, do you not recognize your own son?"

He begins to walk towards them. The tip of the saber on the floor drag on the floor, making a continuous screech of metal against wood. The two adults are thunderstruck. Their blood chills as they process the question. (They're standing as still as statues, he notices, and it's so very tempting to try to knock them over and shatter them to pieces, just like that flower vase.)

"The hell? Who are you?" His father's hand is shaking violently, trying to keep the gun trained on him. "S-stay away!"

His mother steps out from behind her husband's back. She looks uncertainly at the boy across the room, trying to match his appearance with what she remembered her son looked like. Her hands are clasped tightly just above the low-hanging neckline bosom of the evening gown she's wearing, a scarf draped over her elbows with an air of elegance. She asks, eyes wide, "My son?"

He gives her a smile that is all teeth. "Yes, mother, your _son_."

"But-- but how? W-we thought..." His mother trails off, at a loss for words. She wrings her hands, gripping so tightly her knuckles drain of all color, and it's like she can barely stand to continue looking at him.

"What?" He cuts her blabber off. "That I was locked away? Gone for good? Erased from your lives? Ha!" He gives a short bark of laughter. "I guess you were wrong. Too bad for you."

"You are not normal." His father states, his voice trembling and looking at the boy as if he was a dangerous, rabid animal running rampant inside of his house. It's the truth. It's all he can say.

"You're right. I'm not." He comes to a stop only a few feet away, letting the tip of his blade continue to rest on the floor. "I can tell the future."

That was a joke. Two pairs of wide, fearful eyes stared back at him. His stupid parents actually believed it.

"I know that on this night," he smiles, narrows his eyes, shifts his weight imperceptibly, and the last word rings out with finality: "You will **die**."

He suddenly lunges forward and lops off the fingers that hold the gun. They are severed easily; true to the expectations of a high class household, the antiques are maintained very well.

His father never even sees it coming. Blood sprays across the floral wallpaper as he howls in pain, clutching the little fountaining stumps on his hand that used to have fingers attached to them. His mother lets out a shrill, terror-filled scream, frozen to the spot. He laughs like an insane person.

"You're no son... of ours." His father manages to squeeze the vehement words through gritted teeth from his kneeling position on the ground. He's curled up into a little cute ball, clutching his injury close his chest in a futile attempt to assuage the pain radiating from his hand. "You... you damn monster!"

He stops laughing, and frowns at the man disapprovingly. "That's not very nice of you," he admonishes his parent. "In fact, that's name-calling, which is something I thought all parents tell their children is bad to do. How _very rude._ "

The saber descends, the faint light of the rising moon shining through the window glinting off the antique metal and forming a smooth crescent in the air in the single motion. A strangled cry falls from his father's lips and a thin line of blood appears on his back, spreading through the white pristine dress shirt he wears

"You should apologize, father." He raises it again, and another thin slash blooms across the man's back. "It's only the polite thing to do. After all, you've just made yourself a hypocrite in front of your own kid."

He's shredding his father to bits. He swings the blade left and right, left and right, crisscrossing shallow cuts all over his father's body. It's a wild whipping with a sword instead of a crop. The man is reduced to squealing like a little baby, his hands flapping around in front of him as if he was trying to imitate a crazed tyrannosaurus rex, sobbing in distress.

His fingers become slippery from the blood running down the length of the blade. It's even better when he remembers that he shares a part of that blood. It's lovely. He loves it so much. He wants to peel all the skin from his father's body.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" The man shrieks in between cries, repeating the words like it's his lifeline. Snot and saliva gather and dribble down his chin. "I'm sorry sorry sorry!"

There's a linger, a pause after another brutal slice. His father raises his head a little like he sees hope, sees the boy bring both hands to grip the handle and raise it above his head.

"Apology accepted."

He rams the saber down, the blade going through the back of his father's bowed head and coming out of his nose and impaling the wooden floorboard with one decisive, squelching sound. Gravity drags his dead father's head along the blade until it comes to a rest on the ground with a final heavy thump. A pool of blood is already spreading around the body, and he sees bone in some parts, gleaming with the slick of blood. It reminds the boy of a shish-kebab, which is a particularly charming image. He doesn't remember when he last ate.

By this time, his mother is screaming at the top of her lungs, all traces of lingering attachment towards the boy in front of her vanishing in the midst her hysteria. The incessant sound makes his ears hurt. Her legs have given out underneath her so she's trying to crawl away on her hands and knees. The slim evening gown that she wears isn't helping her cause. He advances on her, picking up his father's revolver along the way.

Her shrieks increases in intensity when she sees him heading towards her. He brushes away the severed fingers that still hold the gun, and takes aim.

"Momma?"

He freezes. His mother turns around with a look of pure terror on her face.

"Jerry!" She screams, fear making her breathless. Not fear for herself, he realizes with a jolt, but fear for the four year old girl across the room. "Don't come any closer, Jerry! Run away! Run away!"

The little girl stumbles towards them, "Momma? What's happening?" She looks confused, and her eyes widen when she sees the gruesome sight of her father. "Momma! Poppa!"

Momma, Poppa. He stares blankly at the girl. No. No, no, no! This isn't supposed to happen!

A sister. He has a little sister. A replacement. His breath turns ragged, he staggers back when his mother seems to magically find her strength again and run over to the girl, gathering her up in her arms. She isn't supposed to exist!

"Stay back! Get away from my daughter!"

_Mother, dear mother,_ he watches the woman press the girl closer like she's trying to shield her with her own body, _such terrible eyes you have for me, please don't look at me like that._ He sees the little girl in her arms staring at him with wide eyes. Suddenly he sees red, he hates her so much. _Don't look at me!_

"Oh?" He doesn't feel his lips move, barely hears what he's saying. Everything is fragmented into a thousand disjointed pieces and he can't find his way back. "Your name is Jerry? That's... a very nice name. It must be nice... to have one."

They scream when he brings up the gun. He laughs at them and fires.

He misses. It barely clears his mother's head. Snarling in displeasure, he lunges forward and snatches the girl from his mother's grasp.

"No!" The woman lurches toward him wildly and he shoots her in the leg. Now she is sobbing in the most pathetic way, a hole in her knee spewing crimson liquid out to the mahogany floorboards.

He holds this 'Jerry' up with one hand gripping her little skull, watching the girl squirm in his grip like a worm. "Disgusting, vile thing," he says. He bares his teeth at her terrified face, and _squeezes._

What comes out of the little girl's mouth is the most horrible noises he's ever heard from a human being; terror-filled, ear grating nearly inhuman shrill. It's cut off abruptly when her skull fractures, her brain compresses under the pressure, he feels her eyeballs bulge and then pop right out from their sockets underneath his palm. He feels her go limp in his hand, feels her hair soak up the blood and her meat ooze out through his fingers.

His mother cries. "No, Jerry! My Jerry!"

Hearing his mother say that thing's name makes him hate it more, and he throws the dead girl with a yell. The body hits the wall with a sickening thud of small limbs, smearing blood all over the surface as it slides down.

The screaming continues, his mother crying for her dead daughter. He doesn't like it.

"Mother, you're being very loud," he tells her and shoots. The screams choke off, small anguished sounds of suffering replacing it.

His voice softens, gaze becoming gentle and tender. "Oh, Mother, dearest Mother," he croons. "You make the most beautiful sounds. I want to hear them forever. I want to keep you in a jar and bring you everywhere with me."

She's on the floor, sobbing out her pain. He drops to his knees beside her, brings his hands up to cup her face lovingly.

"You're as lovely as I remember, Mother," he trails his fingers down to the hole blasted through her stomach, palming the bleeding wound. She screams when his nails dig in, his fingers sink into her flesh until he rips it away, exposing the pink guts underneath. "Oh, but Mother, Mother, your insides are the most lovely of all. They're so, so red," he sinks both hands into her intestines, runs his fingers down the inner side of her rib cage, "So wonderfully warm."

His mother gurgles weakly in reply. She's too weak to struggle, has lost too much blood, in too much pain, in system shock. He feels her life dripping away, sliding through between his fingers like sand and he sighs in content, strokes the vertebrae in her spine lovingly.

A clock mounted on the wall catches his eye and he spares a glance at it. Just past twelve at night, on the nineteenth day of August. He's twelve years-old now.

"It's my birthday," he tells the dying form of his mother, absently sliding a finger down the larger aorta of her heart. "I can't remember if you ever actually gave me anything for my birthdays, before. _They_ didn't care about my birthday either."

She's stopped breathing. Her heart isn't beating anymore. She's lost her warm, isn't as appealing anymore. He stares down at her dead body in incomprehension, realizes that her glassy eyes are stuck looking at the crumpled form of the girl he threw into the wall.

Something wells up inside him, unfamiliar, foreign, nothing he can remember ever feeling before and it continues to grow until it practically hurts. He clutches his shirt, twisting the fabric between his fingers. It hurts.

"So." A chuckle escapes him, flat and humorless, as dead sounding as the bodies that surround him. "So, Mother," he gives her a smile that must look hideous, because it feels nothing more than a mockery, a monster trying to imitate a human, "I never had any part in your heart, did I? You and Father both, never ever."

There are no injuries, nothing on him that is bleeding, nothing that is his. He is fine. He feels like someone is ripping everything out of his core.

"Did you ever love me, Mother? Did I ever belong to you? No?" he asks breathlessly. It feels like there was a giant hand squeezing out all the air in his lungs.

Suddenly he's angry. He's angry like he has always been, all these years, just this rotting, festering parasite that has been lapping hungrily away at his mind and sanity for the past five years.

"You gave me to them! You left me there! You did this to me! You--" he reaches in, grabs blindly at what he can, nails digging into the slippery organs, and rips her lungs clean out. Blood squirts everywhere and it doesn't even make a difference anymore. "You've created a monster, Mother!"

He's laughing, he's opened his mouth wide and thrown his head back, he's making this horrible, empty noise that doesn't sound anything like laughter. He feels weirdly hollowed out, like someone has taken a spoon to his insides and scooped them all out.

It's done. He's accomplished his goal, has fulfilled everything he's waited for in the institute. (And everything is still the same. He still has no name, he's still something broken, still several steps off of being human, still alone. But now he doesn't even have a goal left.)

It's raining when he leaves the building, a cold, driving rain that comes down in the size of marbles, mixing with the blood already on the ground. It drenches him as soon as he steps outside. He stays like that for a while, standing barefoot in the water. He feels the dried blood and caked gore drip in rivulets down his skin, feels the stickiness get swept away by the rain as if it's cleaning him (but he'll never be clean again, he's never been clean since they'd taken him downstairs, everything will still be there and he's given up on the hope of ever washing it off).

There's something extra around his neck, a crystal locket that had previously been on his mother's neck. Inside is a tooth, fresh and white and meticulously cleaned of any filth. It's too small to be an adult's.

_Happy birthday to me._


	3. Old-Fashioned and Vaguely Poetic

Weather, he finds out, is kind of like rolling dice—only there are twenty different sides, you don't know what's written on any of them, and you're throwing it into a blizzard where the dice are blown away and you never find them ever again.

Having been raised in an environment where everything was regulated, carefully calibrated and kept to moderate temperatures in order to keep raw chemicals from going out of sorts, he's never had to worry about things like outside weather or _getting sick._

Thus, when he finds himself sniffling uncontrollably every two seconds and looking at his pink toes because it's freezing and there's snow falling from the sky, he doesn't really know what to do.

The week after the thunderstorm, he'd wandered aimlessly through the countryside in the rain, avoiding police, people and human civilization in general. He'd been feeling a bit empty as a whole, like when you open a bag of chips but there's only air inside, no chip. The thing that has kept him going for the past five years is already over and done with, and so he's having trouble finding something new to fixate on. A meaning, perhaps, to the life he's lost in, maybe even something to live for?

(Because finding something he'd die for would be too easy.)

So he spends the next few days walking but not really seeing where he's going, just that he's going _somewhere._

Then it starts to get really cold. Whereas it had been a little chilly before, now he starts seeing frozen little pools of rain and frosty grass in the mornings, and in the evenings his breath hangs in the air in front of him. His feet prickle like there's always needles under them, and his fingers feel stiff and numb.

And when the snow starts coming down, his entire body starts feeling _really_ numb. Even his thoughts feel sluggish.

Weather, he decides, is an asshole.

The snow is falling heavier than ever and the ground is so cold it feels like it's on fire. Every breath stings his lungs. He doesn't remember when he last ate or sleep, or indulged in any of the things normally required for a human being to continue functioning.

Despite all his efforts, he eventually ends up in the dark alleyway of a bustling city. It's okay though. He isn't putting much effort with the avoiding people thing anymore. In fact, he isn't putting much effort into anything.

So what does it matter, he asks himself as he settles next to some overflowing trash bins, quickly being covered in a layer of snow, what does it matter if he simply dies here?

He has no friends, no relatives, no one that knows him. No possessions but the clothes on his back and the thing around his neck, no loose ends to tie up, and he bets that if he tries looking, there won't be any official records of his identity either (they'd been very thorough, after all). There is literally nothing connecting him to this world and no one to mourn for him if he dies.

 _So no,_ he thinks, as the snow piles up around him and his head gradually becomes too heavily to hold up, his eyes close and his breathing slows, _it doesn't matter._

* * *

It's nearly evening and Madam Mars is running late when she sees something out of the corner of her eye. It's the strangest color to see on a day like this, when the skies are overcast and grey, when every color seems less vibrant because the sun can't shine through the clouds.

She sees it as she's passing through one of the many back alleyways she takes to get to the city's red-light district. And although she knows the girls at the brothel will be opening up shop soon, she can't help but take a pause.

It's the color of the palest summer sky, the kind of blue you only see when the sun is at its peak, mercilessly beating down upon the lands below.

It's a _person_ , she realizes with a jolt, and upon closer inspection she sees that not only is that a person half-buried beneath the snow banks, that's a _child_ as well.

The blue that she saw is the boy's hair, and though she has seen plenty of odd hues that people dye their hair nowadays, it looks too consistent and too thorough to be artificial. His eyebrows and even his eyelashes, she sees, are the same blue.

Even in a city as large as this, with a considerable number of homeless like any other large city, there aren't that many people who genuinely freeze to death in the elements. Most of them are able to find ways of obtaining shelter from the cold, so she wonders why this child hasn't done the same.

"Hey there," she kneels next to the motionless boy in the snow, ignoring the cold soaking into her coat and her shoes. "You still alive?"

She takes in the boy's gaunt face and cracked lips, tinged blue from the cold. If he's as starved and dehydrated as he looks, he won't be for much longer. Not to mention the nasty case of hypothermia he must be having.

The boy barely cracks open an eye before closing it again, effectively dismissing her as simple as one would with a fly.

Madam Mars frowns and pats the boy's cheek. "Wake," she orders, but only gets a weak attempt to avoid her hand and an even weaker mumble.

"Leave me alone," she hears him say, barely a whisper of a breath.

"If I leave, you'll die."

By the way he is slumping further into the snow, the boy clearly doesn't give a shit.

Something glints in the dim lighting and for an alarming second Madam Mars is worried that it's a knife and the boy is faking it all. But no, it's a locket, rectangular in shape and no larger than the first knuckle of a thumb. How curious, she thinks, and reaches for it.

A grip like iron fixes itself around her wrist and for a moment, Madam Mars is convinced that the bone will snap.

" _ **Don't touch**_ ," the boy snarls, the few dying embers of life that still remains in him rekindling into a scorching fire.

Madam Mars jerks her hand back and rubs at the bruised flesh through her gloves, but is more preoccupied with how the eyes that are now wide open and burning holes through her head, are neon yellow and spring green—and glowing.

Her first thought is that the boy is wearing some sort of colored contact lenses. But the brilliant hues look too real, too far from just a solid flat covering, and she sincerely doubts that someone in his position cares about something as trivial as appearance.

And then there's the _cunning_ in his gaze, the predator edge and too inhuman intelligence nearly brimming over behind those strange eyes of his; that seem too similar to those of a raging wild beast, ramming itself over and over into the bars that hold it in captivity.

For someone half dead, he feels too dangerous.

She's never seen anything like it.

"I thought you didn't care?" Madam Mars raises an eyebrow at him, though she's already watching the vestiges of life leaking out of him once again. "You seem to care more about a piece of jewelry than yourself."

When she gets no response, she reaches down and pulls the boy out, brushing away the snow in his hair and his clothes. His flesh is ice to touch and his skin looks two shades too close to death. But he's still breathing, even if it is much too shallow and the spaces in between each breath is too large. Breathing means still alive.

And despite the boy's earlier efforts, Madam Mars has lived and seen enough to tell the difference between someone who genuinely wants to die, and someone who has simply lost their purpose. (She's given purposes back to more people than she can count in her life and she thinks perhaps this is no different.)

It takes two rings for someone to pick up the phone, which means that the girls are still busy getting ready.

_"Madam? Something happen?"_

"An emergency. Tell the girls we're not opening tonight," she says, keeping a careful count on the child's pulse at the same time. Much too slow. "Prepare a warm bath, and have blankets and something hot to drink ready."

_"Madam? Wh—"_

She's already putting her phone back in her pocket and taking her scarf off, idly wishing she has something better than a winter scarf to wrap the frozen child in.

Madam Mars is a large woman, but even so, a child shouldn't weigh as little as what she feels she's holding when she picks him up. He's lighter than a feather. She can hold him entirely with one arm.

Not good, she muses as she picks up her abandoned bags with the other arm, and hurries back to her girls.   
______________

The girls, when they see the young boy in her arm, immediately jump into action as one.

Vega takes the boy while Electra pries the bags from Madam Mars's fingers, and her coat is taken by another who she can't see.

Juno comes to inform her of a few customers at the front, who are apparently upset they didn't open tonight.

"I'll handle that. You know what to do, girls," Madam Mars is so proud of these women who she's practically raised from girlhood. Clever, resilient, and quick to react in sudden crises, she's taught them well. "Get to it."

The boy's clothes are so frozen solid with ice they have to cut them from his body. Modesty isn't much of a thing in a brothel, but there's a moment of silence when they see the old scars on his body. Scars that old, that even have the stretch marks around them you only get from growing up with them, and judging by how young the boy already is—they couldn't have been inflicted later than when he was just seven years old.

(They look like _dissection_ scars.)

The shock lasts until Juno picks up the naked boy and dumps him unceremoniously into the tub of hot water.

The boy jolts, halfway waking up but too weak for his sputtering and wild thrashing to make any difference against the hands holding him down in the water. With his skin so cold and frozen, the sudden temperature change makes it feel as if he's drowning in molten lava.

Thirty seconds later, he passes out again, and they're able to scrub him down and wash his hair in relative peace. Ceres arrives with a set of clothes the girls must have scrounged up together from each of their own closets. Once dried and clothed, they bundle the boy up with as many warm blankets they can find and put him in one of the extra rooms that have already been cleared.

Ten minutes later they get a triumphant cry from Neptune, "He's waking up!" and all the girls come running. Together she and Vega have the time of their lives forcing a steaming hot broth that Juno had whipped up down the throat of the indignantly spluttering, kicking, protesting boy.

"With a kick like that, you'd think he hadn't been dying a few minutes ago," Vega comments with a wince when a stray foot hits its mark.

Having something warm in his system seems to bring the boy to better coherence, because he starts to be able to form comprehensible words.

"What is—?" Being sushi-wrapped in so many layers of blankets, he seems to be confused as to why his limbs are so hard to move freely. "Who—!"

"Hush now." The boy stares in bewilderment at the finger suddenly on his lips, going cross-eyed in the process. Electra smiles (while mentally cooing at the cute sight it makes), "We just saved you from freezing to death. I'm called Electra. Would you tell us your name?"

"I." They watch the boy open his mouth and then close it, and then there's a period of silence before he finally tells them, "I don't have one."

Electra doesn't bat an eye. "Okay, then what would you like us to call you?"

He blinks several times, so sure they were going to think him strange for not having a name, then shrugs. "I don't really care."

This seems to be a signal for all the girls to crowd around him, tittering in excitement as they debate what kind of name he'd like more.

The boy looks at them like he's not sure if they are real or not, and Electra can see that he's still not all there, still too pale and still shivering under the swaths of blankets he has wrapped around him.

But most of the girls at Madam Mars's brothel had arrived bearing nothing but themselves and the resolve to find a place to belong to. Others, who had somehow ended up there but hadn't necessarily stayed, had chosen to discard their original names, their reasons varying greatly, though all personal. A name that they can choose, some believe, is one of the few things they have absolute control over; something they can genuinely own and call theirs.

Thus the choosing of names, over the years, has eventually become a thing of great importance. To them, it means not only a second chance and an opportunity to start fresh, but also something to tell others that they are a group that belongs together (as it so happens, all of the names chosen turn out to be related in some way or another to Greek or Roman mythology).

"I _really_ like Jupiter," says Neptune.

Ceres slaps her over the head. "You only like it because you've been looking for someone to choose a planet name for a while now. How about Olympus?"

"A little too on the nose, Ceres," says Vega. "We need more subtlety, like—like Delphinus. Hey, you look like you could be a Delphi, what say you?"

"Nova," Juno states solemnly, completely plowing over whatever Vega and Ceres had been trying to say. "Nova means 'new'. It could symbolize new beginnings, if that's what you're looking for."

"Girls, perhaps if he doesn't want a Greek name?" Electra suggests. "Besides, we don't even know if he's staying."

They look back at the boy, who's blinking heavily and looks like he's about to fall asleep again. Immediately he finds himself being gently pushed back, a pillow magically appearing under his head, and more covers pulled over him. He's too tired to think about it all too thoroughly now, and the warmth that surrounds him feels too good for him to care about questioning it (so different from the cold he's sick and tired of always feeling).

He snuggles deeper into the blankets as if seeking more warmth until all they can see is a head of blue hair and the tip of one ear. The five young women all melt a little at the sight.

"I wish he is," Vega whispers. "But probably not."

Ceres nods sadly, absently stroking the strange blue hair the boy, now deeply asleep, somehow has. "Probably," she agrees, then hums in delight, "His hair's so soft! You'd think it's all damaged from the bleaching and hair dye he must go through."

Neptune looks over, and says, "Don't think that's hair dye, it seems natural to me. Just look at the roots. All blue."

"No way, a color like this?"

"Blue." Juno suddenly says. "His name can be Blue, like his hair."

Ceres and Vega both look at her like she's committed treason. "Have some creativity," says Vega. "You can't possibly be thinking of naming a person after their own _hair_."

Juno seems to be thinking. "Carrion?"

"Too morbid, Juno," Electra sighs.

"Hey, remember how he has a locket?" Madam Mars told us not to touch it, because when she tried she nearly got her hand broke," says Neptune. "It must mean something important to him, if he'd break someone's hand over it even when half frozen to death. Maybe we can take inspiration from that?"

"So like Lockette?" Ceres suggests. "Locklyn, Lachlain, Lockian, Harlock, Sherlock, Skylock?"

"Or just Lock," Neptune says.

"Isn't that too simple?"

"They say less is more."

"Then it's just like Juno naming him Blue!"

"His name will be Lockhardt," says Electra, before it escalates too high and wakes up their guest. "Until further notice. It's classy, kind of has an old-fashioned aesthetic, vaguely poetic. Now come, let's give him some peace."

* * *

The first time he hears one of the women call him Lockhardt, he blinks for a moment, then answers, "Yeah?"

The woman with the traces of an old slums accent, whose name is Neptune, smiles widely. "Do you like it?"

He pauses in between spoonfuls of stew, takes the time to think about it, and nods. "It's good," he says, doesn't think he has to elaborate on what he thinks is good, because the woman's sharp eyes don't miss anything.

The women in this brothel, he finds out, are all similarly strong-willed, wily, and seem to be used to taking care of strangers their matron brings in from time to time. They're also always coddling him, constantly ruffling his hair, pinching his cheeks, giving him food to eat, and otherwise cooing over him like doting big sisters. They're treating him like the child his age tells him he should be, and it's confusing. He doesn't know how to deal with it.

One day he's listening to the women converse together, who seem to have made the room he's staying in a common place to convene in. Their conversations, he's noticed, are fast paced and lively, smoothly flowing from one topic to the next with such ease and practice that only comes from long years lived together that it spins his head. They always make an active effort to include him, which might be why they're always in his room when they're not sleeping or working. But he can't seem to find any motivation to speak, and simply listening requires much less effort.

Something's been gnawing at him for a while though, and finally he speaks up when one of the woman, Vega, he thinks is her name, is fussing over his hair and telling him they might need to give it a trim soon, it's starting to look like a mop.

He furrows his brow. "Why—"

He stops, even while the rest of the room quiets down, because apparently he hasn't thought this through enough, he doesn't know how to continue. Why are they taking care of him? Why are they treating him like a child? Why are they so gentle with him? Why has he been kept warm and full? Why is he even here?

It's Electra who speaks, and she counters his non-sequitur with a question of her own, with none of the preamble others would normally like to tack on something so blunt. "Why are there so many scars on your body?"

While the other woman stare at her, he finds himself appreciating the directness. He knows those ugly old scars, the only ones that will never go away, although he's had them for so long he's nearly forgotten that they were there.

"I got dissected one time, because they wanted to test my pain tolerance." He pauses, then adds, "It's pretty high."

"Okay," Electra says. "Well, are those people gone?"

That's right, he remembers now. These are the women who can accept the most absurd and horrible of explanations without even blinking.

He thinks about the burning building, seeming so long ago, and how the man who'd been friends with the other man who had ripped his head off had said, 'no survivors', and nods. "Very gone."

"Good," says Electra, and tells him that things work differently here. No child, they believe, should be unloved like he obviously had been.

This startles him. Love? Everyone he's met has been so preoccupied by other things they never had any time or spare effort for love. Or they'd been so entrenched in love for one particular thing that they were eventually destroyed by their own obsession. Something like that, in his opinion, can't be that important.

Then, he challenges the women, what's love to them?

"A very commonly asked question," Juno remarks thoughtfully. "Yet never well answered."

But Ceres says, "Love is something you're either born with, given to you, or you have to work for it."

To which Neptune adds, "Genuine love is unconditional. Never test someone who's given that to you."

It's beautiful and powerful in a terrible way, it can enable a person to do anything, according to Vega, while Electra believes in its potential to encompass anything.

"I think," says Juno suddenly. "I think that love is a series of vital chemical reactions generated by the human body."

He looks at Juno, the most quiet and solemn one of the group, his attention caught by the sheer sterility of the answer. "Seems to me you don't really think of romance that much."

The young woman simply stares back at him, tilts her head. "Do you know why we feel hunger, Lock?"

A sterile question deserves a sterile answer, he supposes. "When the nutrients my body requires need to be replenished, my stomach sends a message to my brain, which triggers the sensation of hunger so I will feed to continue functioning."

"And that is not a vital series of chemical reactions?" Juno asks rhetorically. "If you take a man and take away his ability to feel hunger, he will starve to death because he will not realize that his body lacks the nutrients required to survive."

Oh, now he understands. "You think it's the same for love?"

"I believe," she answers, "That if we don't need love, our bodies won't induce us to feel it."

Love, he decides, is not something that he's familiar with. It does, however, keep the cold away.


	4. Dreams And Those Discarded

>   
>  _"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am."_  
>  _—Sylvia Plath,_ The Bell Jar  
> 

* * *

When the thinness of his limbs and the pallor of his skin improves to bearable levels, the boy they named Lockhardt begins to go outside of the room he'd been staying in for the past two weeks.

Sometimes the girls will set him to chores and tasks, like washing the dishes or cleaning the lobby during the daytime. At night, however, they make sure to keep him away from the public areas of the brothel. Both to spare him the sight of their work, and because Lockhardt, they all agree, is rather pretty for a boy. Electra insists that it's because all children are beautiful, but the boy's odd, colorful appearance only serves to alienate him from the rest.

(It's not that their profession is something to be ashamed of, in fact most of the girls are working of their own volition. Although they've learned the basics of education from Madam Mars, they lack the proper credentials to find a job in other areas. Most don't even want to. The working conditions in Madam Mars's brothel are remarkably better than other establishments, even in the big cities, where customers don't dare harass the girls unless they want to be evoked from the brothel in a permanent and painful way. And some, such as Ceres, Vega, and Neptune, simply like sex.)

But despite their efforts, they soon discover that Lockhardt has a sort of apathy towards the aspects of their nighttime activities that is both impressive and terribly sad. He has no trouble doing the laundry, which often includes the women's lingerie and soiled bedsheets from the night before, nor going through each of the rooms and cleaning them of evidence in preparation for the next customer, nor when the women walk out, often completely nude.

"I'm used to it," he says when they tell him that he doesn't have to do the laundry or wipe the surfaces. "Body fluids are all the same after a while."

Sometimes the boy will get a look on his face, something unpredictable and uncontrollable and dangerous. It's the look of someone who has lost everything and doesn't have anything left to hold him back. Like a once-mighty predator, Neptune once said to the other girls, that has been trapped in a corner and brought down so low it simply doesn't care anymore.

The times when Lockhardt gets that look frighten the girls more than they want to admit. But they've dealt with more, they say to themselves, they've seen scarier. More threatening.

And then there are the small moments when the starved child in him comes out, the one they'd all seen since the first time he spoke to them. Small moments like when Ceres runs her fingers through his hair after she's finished brushing it, and he leans into the brief caress without even realizing it. Like when Neptune gives him her one-armed hugs that she's so fond of, and he automatically relaxes into the embrace like he's seeking more.

He never questions the contact, never pulls away or seems especially perturbed by them. Lockhardt will accept any form of physical contact without protest or even any indication that he's aware of it himself, but never actively seeks it out. These are the times when they can clearly see the touch-starved child in him who's too used to being unloved, spent so many years deprived of affection that he's eventually learned to stop asking for it.

They all recognize the signs, and even though sometimes Lockhardt seems just one paper cut away from turning into that deadly demon they often see lurking behind his eyes, they treat him with love and care in hopes of perhaps making up for the things that's been taken away from him.

"Are you trying to fix me?" He asks one day when a month has passed and he's helping Ceres make sandwiches for lunch.

"Fix you?"

Lockhardt nods. "I've noticed it. You're all too nice to me and too used to it. Madam Mars brings back broken things like me and you all try to fix it by being nice and giving it food."

"Nuh uh, not true." He blinks in surprise when Ceres pokes a dollop of chocolate spread onto his nose. "Not true at all." Ceres giggles when he wrinkles his nose and wipes it off.

The boy gives her an unamused look. "If you keep doing this, eventually you'll get someone who doesn't care about what you think and what you're trying to do for them," he continues. "It's gonna all backfire and this grand castle you built with your friends will come falling down on your heads."

"Madam Mars didn't just teach us how to read and write, you know," Ceres says. "And she's experienced. She knows how to tell apart the truly stupid and evil ones."

"But people are always stupid and evil. That's why Hell is so full of them." Something tells the young woman that Lockhardt isn't talking about the place in the Bible where the souls of the damned go after dying. "Being kind to people won't change that. It's going to hurt you instead."

"Those who know suffering are capable of being kind to others even more because of it. That's not a sign of weakness, Lockhardt."

The boy frowns, unable to understand the ideals that these women have. "Your precious people will be your vulnerabilities," he tries to tell her. "People go away so easily. Your castle will fall."

"Then I guess it's good we built it with diamond."

* * *

Lockhardt—or Lock, as he likes everyone to call him, simply because it's one less syllable to say and sounds less pompous (Electra had rolled her eyes when she heard that)—has seen Madam Mars a couple of times throughout his stay. His impression of her is "one not to be trifled with".

Madam Mars is a striking figure in any setting; a sturdily-built woman with the looks of a supermodel who's over six feet tall, sharp eyed as a hawk. She emanates poise, sophistication, and class, along with the feeling that she can break a man in half while wearing six-inch heels with a glass of wine in the other hand, according to Neptune, who seems to like her metaphors.

One day Madam Mars asks Lock what he wants to do. What his future plans are, and although he is welcome to stay with them, she says, he's still very young and that leaves him plenty of time to make a life of his own.

A term pokes at his memory, from about three months ago, though it seems much longer, that came from the lips of a man who was dead a minute later—and he asks her what a Hunter is.

Hunters, Lock finds out after a thorough explanation (described with such in-depth detail that he fancies the idea of Madam Mars being one before, though it seems farfetched even for his standards), are kind of like mercenaries, but better.

He doesn't really care about the flowery bits the officials seemed to have added onto the title, like preserving precious cultural pieces of history or protecting knowledge, people, and nature. What does interest him, though, is the hows of becoming one.

What's a better way, after all, to stave off boredom than to participate in a glorified contest that sated humanity's eternal competition for dominance and power, guaranteed with life-threatening situations? (The part about being able to use a Pro Hunter license to bypass laws and regulations, such as murder, might have also aided that decision.)

Unfortunately the Hunter Exams are always held in the second week of January, so it gives him about two entire months to waste.

The girls don't seem very surprised when he tells them about his decision to participate in this year's Hunter Exam, and he finds out it's because some of the people they've taken in also had the same thinking. Almost none of them succeed, they warn him, and definitely not on the first try. It's also very uncommon, though not entirely unheard of, for someone his age to apply, so that means the odds are stacked even more against him.

Just as well, he says, the higher the stakes, the merrier. Electra ruffles his hair in good faith, and doesn't even try to hide her concern.

There is an incident, four months into his stay.

Lock has been going out into the city during day hours for a while now, so one day Madam Mars sends him out to do the grocery shopping. Even if the weather is warmer now, she still wraps her scarf—the same one that she'd wrapped around him on that first snowy night— around his neck, telling him to keep warm and keep safe.

(It's working. He's been feeling more warmth than cold these days, like the cold doesn't dare come back to him, not when Madam Mars and the girls are there to drive it away.)

He's on his way back when a group of four men begin to follow him. They wear the marks of one of the gangs that frequents the city's more destitute districts. He doesn't know why they've set their eyes on him.

It becomes harder to ignore them as he progresses, especially when the paths he takes to get to the brothel takes him on darker, more isolated streets where there's not much people around. This makes the men more confident, and one of them catches up just as he turns a corner.

The moment a hand lands on his shoulder he feels something inside of him snap violently, and burst forth.

(It's a creature he's kept inside of him for four months, bundled up like those blankets had been around him when he first woke up, tightly restrained inside a box he's constructed unknowingly, made out of everything that the girls at the brothel have tried to impart on him. But the pressure has been building, building up until it is bursting at the seams, and like gravity, all it takes is a little _push_ —and so he feels it open up, feels it unfurl like a pair of wings, singing its freedom through his bones.)

Suddenly the man is on the ground screaming because there is an empty space in the socket of his eye. Blood is spurting everywhere. Lock feels something in his hand and looks down to see an eyeball dangling by a tendon in his fingers, dripping thickly onto the brown grocery bags he's holding.

"Fuck! AHHH FUCK, my _eye!_ "

The man's friends jump and let out cries of shock, which quickly turns to outrage.

"Fuggin' hell kid! You'll pay for that!"

Lock turns to look at them, as if in contemplation. Suddenly one of the men yells out in disgust and surprise as he finds his friend's eyeball flung into his shirt while the boy runs away. "Shit!"

"Get back here you little fuck!"

They chase him down the narrow alleyway, leaving their fallen friend behind to groan out his miseries on the ground. The groceries bounce around haphazardly in his arms and he finds himself slightly encumbered by it, but Lock tightens his hold on them, and looks for a way to lose the men chasing him. (Or kill them, something small and ugly in his mind reminds him, wouldn't it be so much easier to simply kill them? Slaughter every single one of them. Why are you _running away?_ )

Returning to the brothel, he knows, won't be possible now. Not before he gets rid of these—( _Trash_ , snarls his mind, the urge growing bigger and stronger, _vile, repulsive little pieces of garbage! What the hell are you waiting for? They got in your way! They don't deserve to exist!_ )

He's nearly entering the city's red light district when he veers onto a different path, this one leading to the old, abandoned outskirts of the city. Soon he's surrounded by desolate, dirty, empty buildings, no one in sight except for the men who are gaining quickly on him. ( _It's perfect! Get them!_ It screams, thrashing like a wild beast, _Slaughter them all! Bathe in their blood!_ ) There's an abandoned school building with doors locked by an old bolt that looks rusted enough to easily kick through, so that's what he does.

The chains on the door leading to the stairs are ripped away as well, and he climbs them two at a time as he listens to his pursuers barrel up the stairs behind him. They're a little out of breath, but they're laughing nastily, making fun of the boy who seems to be only running himself into an inescapable dead end.

"Where're you going, you freak?" They ask him tauntingly. The long tail of the boy's scarf trailing behind him looks so tempting to reach out and just _pull_. "There's no place to go up there!"

And then he's bursting out onto the roof, out into the open air and looking at the cloudy expanse of sky around him. He turns around to face the men, backing up every step they advance on him until the heels of his shoes touch the ledge that separates the rooftop from the empty air behind him.

"Aw, where's the little freak gonna run off to now? Gonna sprout wings and fly?"

He spares a glance back. Two stories. Not quite a lethal fall.

Lock looks at the three men, the fourth left forgotten in that alley while his friends ran off to serve their misguided vengeance. How pathetic, he thinks, and a familiar smile spreads itself across his face, empty and dead and terrifying all at once. He sees the men flinch.

"Wings?" He calls out to them in amusement, "Who says I need those?"

And then he turns around and leaps over the edge. The men behind him shout in surprise. For a moment it feels like he weighs nothing. Then gravity takes hold and he falls with it, crashing to the ground in a roll that doesn't quite take the edge off the impact.

When he drags himself up, he doesn't hear them pursue. Looks like they don't want to screw with the lunatic that jumps off buildings and onto solid concrete. Lock smiles to himself, and heads back.

The women nearly have collective heart failure when Lock comes stumbling in through the back door covered in blood and bruises. Some of his fingers look as if twisted out of shape. The fabric at his knees and elbows on his clothes are torn and bloody, the skin underneath scraped so deeply they nearly see bone. A large, splotchy expanse of blue and dark purple spans across the right side of his temple and down his cheekbone, and his lip looks as if it has been bitten clean through. Clutched in his mangled fingers though, are the brown bags full of the things they sent him out to get, the paper stained here and there by dark red where he holds them.

"I have the groceries," he says, and smiles sweetly.

(Something has changed. They see him and he looks exactly as he has always looked; this young, scrawny boy whose pallor of skin seems closer to death than the living, with blue locks of hair and too-strange eyes. The terrible, frightening, malicious thing in him has always been buried somewhere underneath that visage, only rearing its head every once in awhile. But now it seems more tangible. More real and more… _there._

There's a sort of vigor in Lock's movements and how he talks that hasn't been there before, as though he's found a drive to do and not just be—like he's found a meaning again. The women of the brothel aren't very sure, however, if this is a blessing or an omen. It's something they've never seen nor dealt with despite the number of people they've aided before.

Now, it frightens them.)

* * *

_The hospital was a regal, beautiful thing. The building itself was a large and strong structure that stood nobly in its place. It was located in the countryside, a fair distance away from human civilization. The Institute got its money from the patients themselves. The staff followed a religion built on lies, imagination, and misguided notions. What was said on paper wasn't quite done within the private confines of the institute._

_He was dragged out of his bed by his hair. His eyes startled open as his tiny hands automatically flew up to the source of pain, lips parted in a silent startled cry._

_"Come on dear, up you go now! It's time for your session!" The nurse had an awful smile plastered onto her face. She was still holding fistfuls of his hair in an iron grip. It felt as if the skin on his head was going to be ripped off. He clutched uselessly at the nurse's fingers, while stumbling as she led him out the room and down the hall._

_They passed a woman, observing them through a veil of tangled hair as she stood stock-still near the wall. Loitering Lottie was also a patient, who never went to bed and always wandered listlessly in the hallways. The staff weren't particularly bothered by this, so they simply let her be, and only locked her up when there were inspections. He met her eyes with his own teary, watering ones. Her bleak gaze stayed on him until they turned the corner._

_He recognized this hallway. His eyes went wide, his knees locked, and he began to struggle in earnest for the first time since waking up, even though his hair really was being pulled out._

_"No! Let me go!" He clawed his fingers, and the nurse's rubber smile wilted a bit as she hissed in pain when he scratched her. Another hand joined the one on his head and he yelped, but couldn't find it in himself to stop. He recognized this hallway! "I don't want to go!"_

_The nurse's smile was more of a bare of her teeth as she looked down at him, her voice dripping in honey. "Why not, sweetie?"_

_No, this hallway, the one he walked down every week! The room at the end! No, no, no, no, **no!**_

_"I don't want to go!" He wailed, shaking his head violently, planting his feet on the linoleum floor, putting his entire weight against the nurse's pull. "I don't want to go!"_

_Other nurses and doctors arrived to help the nurse with the struggling young boy. He clawed and thrashed and shrieked his desperation so loud that he was sure everyone in the Lower West wing could hear, until somebody clocked him on the head hard enough to make his vision swim._

_"It's for your own good," the nurse was saying in the background of everything that was happening. "We're going to make you get better, so don't worry."_

_To get better, he thought bitterly, there had to be something wrong with him. What was wrong with him? He didn't understand. He didn't understand why this had to happen to him._

_(The treatments didn't so much as cure the problems as they made them. )_

_They put him on a table and strapped him to it. He strained and pulled against the thick leather straps, but only succeeded in nearly dislocating his wrists._

_He could feel, rather than see or hear (the fluorescent light was blinding, his ears were stuffed full of fluff and the deafening sound of his blood rushing in his veins), the people around him moving about around him, and he trembled in place._

_What were they going to do to him this time? He couldn't bear to wait to find out._

_("...today's agenda…"_

_"...stren... augmentation... not... next time…"_

_"...focus more... this... first step…"_

_"...p...receptors... need to be…")_

_His heart was beating too fast. He had a fleeting irrational fear that it was going to leap from his very chest and flop out onto the cold tile floor like a wet fish._

_A hand moved in the corner of his vision. It was covered by blue latex gloves. It held a bottle, and a syringe._

_Someone was wiping his thigh with a cotton swab, he realized. His breath hitched. If he wasn't going have a heart attack, he was going to suffocate. (Somehow, in the very, very back of his mind, he wished that would happen to him. Anything but_ this _.)_

_Out of pure instinct and no sensical thought at all, he started struggling again. He shook his head violently and banged it against the hard examination table; he pulled his restraints, moved anything he could that as much as he could; simply struggled for the sake of it. It was pointless effort but he couldn't bring himself to care._

_The doctors were taken aback somewhat by this sudden activity. They paused._

_("...a danger... proced…"_

_"...sedative…?"_

_"...no ... disruption of... ser... effects...accurate results.")_

_They held him down together, and it wasn't very difficult because he only had the still-developing muscles and small, fragile bones of a child to fight against these adults. He finally felt the prick of a needle, and cried out at both the sudden pain and at the horror of what it would do to him._

_(The doctors nodded thoughtfully to themselves, and took notes. One of them prepared another dose.)_

_It was horrible and terrifying. He felt everything but could not tell what the sensations were caused by. Pain! From the unknown substances being injected into his flesh? From the restraints that cut into his wrists, his ankles, his hips, his shoulders? From his head, that he had banged against the examination table? Cold! From the hard metal surface upon which he laid on? From the doctors' awful, chilled fingers?_

_He spasmed. And screamed. And cried._

_He felt nauseous. The urge to throw up was too strong and he could feel it bubbling up at the back of his throat, which made him feel even worse. It bubbled up and past his lips but it had nowhere to go except down, which meant it tried to go back into his mouth while he was still throwing up and so he choked on his own vomit._

_The injections had stopped now. Doctors were unbuckling him from the table and holding a pan to his face, as he retched and coughed and retched and shook._

_He cried. And raged. And wished._

_He was too young (hadn't been able to see much of anything of the world yet, had lived a fairly sheltered life until then) to understand the concept of wishing for death but now he desired, more than anything, for someone to take him away from this awful place. Someone to rescue him, to save him from the terrible people, to take care of him and to love him—_

_The feeling of want was overwhelming and yet he could not satisfy it no matter how loud he pleaded for it in his mind and in his screams. He struggled to draw air into his lungs._

_He wished he could be anywhere but inside this horrible hospital. Suffering from the doctors and nurses and fear of the things they could do came in equal amounts to him and the other patients who could still manage coherent thought. Everyday was painful. Everything was painful. He wished he could make it stop. He wished he would no longer be able to feel the sharp sting of a needle, or the throb of bruised bone where strong hands had grasped too hard, or the lingering ache of still-twitching, strained muscles._

_If he wouldn't be taken away from here, he wished, at least, for some relief from the pain._

_(He met an old soldier, whose psyche was too battered and broken, and had no friends, whose distant family didn't want to take care of him and his problems and had thus betrayed him also. It was from the battle-wizened, paranoid man that he learned his words and the rest of his numbers; simple, common things people were expected to know as they grew up. After putting a stop to a 'treatment session' when a doctor had tried to take things much, much too far (and close), he thought that yes, this was the person he was waiting for._

_If not a savior then an ally, to protect him from within the hospital, and though things stayed the same he felt better with knowing that at the very least, he had a person that cared about him._

_Then he didn't see him for a week and found out only much later that the old man had died after an overdose on medication. It was a clear sign of medical malpractice, but the man had no friends and what few relatives he possessed had all but forgotten him inside of that hell hospital._

_He was the only one who had mourned for the old soldier. And it was from there on that he decided never to expect anything from anyone anymore.)_

_It was a week before his eighth birthday when his wish came true, and pain came to him no longer._

_(He would never admit it to anyone aloud, but sometimes he missed those human sensations.)_

* * *

He wakes up with a start. Lock can't remember what happened to make him wake up, but he feels strangely hollowed out. Like someone had carved everything out within from him. Empty.

"You had a dream."

Lock turns his gaze from the ceiling to the direction where the voice had come from and sees Vega there, in her sleepwear, pale blue eyes gazing down at him. Now he feels the fingers on his head, soothing and so terribly gentle as they run through his hair.

"Dream?" He asks her, voice barely a whisper. It feels as though something is missing from deep inside him and he doesn't know what.

Vega hums softly. "Not a very good one. It looked painful."

Pain? He... hasn't felt pain in a long time. He's not sure he can remember what it is anymore.

But perhaps, Lock thinks (and that's definitely not hope he feels—it's not), perhaps this strange gaping emptiness in his chest is something close to it.

Something must have shown on Lock's face (it's so irking, sometimes, that these women are able to read his expressions and his body language like an open book), because Vega smiles and offers, "A cup of hot milk, what say you?"

She begins to pull back, starts to rise from her position at his bedside, probably to get the aforementioned drink.

Physical separation feels like a blow to the abdomen. _Can't lose this._ Lock reaches out, falls halfway out of bed, as he tries to pull a surprised Vega back, frantically digging his fingers into whatever he can grasp. Which, as it turns out, is mostly hair, dragging Vega with him in an awkward spill on the floor.

"Jeez, it's not like I mind having hair or anything," Vega says with quiet humor. She wraps her arms around Lock and pulls him, covers and all, into her lap as she settles herself on the floor.

And Lock, wrapped up in his blankets, clings to her the way a child clings to their mother and tries his best to drown in her embrace.

"Hush, Lock, I know," Vega sighs into his hair, rubbing his back through the layers of fabric in between them. Her touch is so soothing, so full of a tenderness that's entirely foreign to him. Lock melts into it helplessly as he listens to her. "Pain is something that humans must endure in their hearts," she says. "And since the heart feels pain so easily, some believe that a life in pain isn't worth it. We are too delicate, our hearts are like glass."

"Like glass," Lock repeats, whispers. He squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to ignore the growing emptiness in his chest.

* * *

There's fire. He's burning. Everything is burning.

Days later since Lock's encounter with the gang members, they've finally tracked him down, they've come and they've brought their friends.

"You took something of ours," they'd said when they stormed the brothel in the middle of the night. "We've come for due payment."

"If you think we're just going to hand him to you, you're mistaken!" Electra had snarled, "He's only a child, besides! What kind of pathetic men are you, seeking revenge out on a child!"

And then she was dead because there was a hole in her forehead and a bullet in her brain. The other girls had cried out in shock at their fallen comrade, and then whirled on the men, turning into ferocious warriors who had only one goal—protect.

"You'll take him over my dead body!" Neptune had cried, like a battle queen, leading her troops into war.

And Lock, Lock was in Madam Mars's arms, with her standing sentinel over him like a lioness protecting her kin. "You mustn't give in," she had murmured in his ear, "Lock, listen to me, you mustn't. There is a frightening force in you, child, and it's very powerful, but you mustn't feed it. Giving into those desires will only let them grow, and they will destroy you after they've destroyed everything else."

And he'd tried to listen, he'd kept his promise to her even when she, like all the other women, had been overpowered by the Grimoire Gang members. He'd stayed even when they shot her seven times in the chest, and she'd sagged slowly to the ground, as though she was unwilling to admit defeat even in death.

But now Lock is looking at their corpses on the ground, strewn about on the wreckage they used to call home. Now he's shaking.

Juno's the last to fall, the silent and deadly force, who had fought with a kind of brutal ruthlessness that Madam Mars didn't even have.

And as she falls, bleeding from a bullet in each of her legs and a fracture in her skull, she looks up and meets his eyes—and with her last dying breath, she whispers, "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

_It's not happening,_ Lock tries to convince himself, _it's not real! All this is just some sort of sick dream and soon he'll wake up and—_

There's a gun, and he's staring down the barrel of it, as it's held point-blank to his head.

_It... it's happening._

Suddenly he feels the urge to laugh. 

_Who is he even kidding?_

And like that, Lock throws everything away and lets himself loose. ( _Yes!_ The Thing shrieks in his mind, _YES! You know better than to listen all that pretty-sounding garbage they tried to brainwash you with, you've seen too much to believe that, you're practically living proof! Now slaughter them all! Now, now, now!_ )

The gun is gone and Lock has it now. Five men go down in fountaining sprays of blood before the rest of them even have the time to blink.

( _Such a good boy,_ It purrs inside him, _now doesn't that feel so much better? It does, doesn't it? It totally does._ ) Lock takes down another two with half a broken lamp rod in the brain, stabbed straight through the eye. After that there's only three left, and they're dead in the next few minutes.

He has blood on his face, and he feels it roll down in rivulets down his cheek, his clothes are ripped and ruined. But there's something that just feels right, like the world makes sense again.

Things are burning, lit aflame somehow in the midst of the fight. Everything's burning. He's burning. _He's so cold._

Lock looks down and there's Neptune at his feet, Ceres laying several feet away, dead eyes staring holes into his skull. ( _Fools_ , It tells him, _all of them. The moment you value someone more than necessary, they up and leave you. All people do is take and take and take, and they **never give any of it back!**_ )

And Lock decides that It has a point. He begins to laugh, and if there's something hysterical in the sound, he doesn't acknowledge it.

"What did I tell you?" Lock laughs uncontrollably. He spreads his hands and gestures to the death and destruction around him. "What did I tell you?! Your castle has _fallen!_ "


End file.
